“I’ve always been a bit of a drooler.”

(Ottawa) It’s the only skeleton in his closet, swears the self-proclaimed “biggest Canadiens fan there is” as he opens the door to a cabinet in his office. The skeleton takes the form of a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey he bought for $10 at Sports Rousseau 25 years ago.

“The parish priest didn’t bench me, though,” says Marc Miller, referring to Roch Carrier’s classic, The hockey jersey. Another distinction: unlike the hero of the story, he wears it without shame – to taunt the adversary.

“I can be sloppy. I’ve always been a bit of a slob. I’m a little petty too. And it’s to have fun,” the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship immediately admits in his premises at the Confederation Building in Ottawa.

He continues in a calm tone matched only by his imperturbable demeanor.

Before making the leap into politics, the now 51-year-old practiced law in New York, Stockholm and then Montreal, with the firm Stikeman Elliott.

His friend James Bailey remembers being surprised to see him take this turn. “We didn’t talk politics much – and honestly, partly because he’s so funny and irreverent, he didn’t seem like the kind of person who was preparing for a career in politics,” says his former law school classmate at McGill University.

He realized the seriousness of his friend’s approach when the latter decided to run for a seat. “I was talking about Canadian politics casually. He responded by mentioning the school busing [politique de mixité sociale] “, he recalls.

Still, this change in trajectory happened “organically,” notes James Bailey, a New York lawyer. Because as is well known, Marc Miller is close to Justin Trudeau – they have been friends for almost 40 years.

From simple soldier to simple deputy

These two have not let go of each other since one asked the other for a pencil in an English class at Jean-de-Brébeuf college, where they completed their education up to college. On the mosaic of graduates, cohort 1991, young Miller has crew-cut hair.

He was already in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve. Was it the influence of his father Carman Miller, author of books on Canadian military history and former dean of the Faculty of Arts at McGill University? A patriotic gesture?

Marc Miller and Justin Trudeau’s paths have diverged as they have moved—but before that, they both backpacked across Europe and Africa after earning their undergraduate degrees from McGill in 1994.

Their paths ended up crossing again in Montreal, towards the end of the 2000s.

There, their relationship takes a political tangent. Marc Miller was at the famous meeting in Mont-Tremblant in July 2012, where the strategy for Justin Trudeau’s campaign in the race for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) was developed.

He then chaired his friend’s fundraising campaign for the race in 2013.

But he is not yet sure whether he wants to join the fray.

“I wasn’t necessarily convinced by the party as such. There were a lot of good people, but a lot of bickering, a lot of chaos. And I still had a job that I liked,” he explains.

He finally decided to run for office under the Liberal banner in the 2015 election in the riding of Ville-Marie–Le Sud-Ouest–Île-des-Sœurs, a Liberal stronghold that had been swallowed up by the NDP orange wave in 2011.

The victory is unequivocal: Marc Miller wins with 50.8% of the votes.

Coming out of the shadows

When he entered the House of Commons, he sat in the back row. Like most backbenchers, he rarely found himself in the limelight.

Until he made a historic gesture. In June 2017, he made a statement in Mohawk in the precinct – he would do it again, delivering a 20-minute speech entirely in Kanyen’kéya, in February 2019.

Watch Marc Miller’s 2017 Mohawk address on the CBC website

Read “MP Marc Miller’s ‘tribute’ to the Mohawk language”

Marc Miller already cultivated this curiosity for indigenous cultures and languages ​​without fanfare, underlines Ghislain Picard, chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador.

“I remember that he took the initiative to contact me, when he was a simple MP. He offered me a meeting with almost the entire Liberal caucus,” he says.

Marc Miller’s love of Indigenous issues is still evident throughout his Ottawa office. Beaded medallions and Indigenous artwork adorn the walls. On his desk is a stack of Kanyen’kéya language learning books.

Because yes, he continues to work on it. It is partly thanks to his wife Elin, who challenged him to go further than this speech, which was echoed in publications such as the New York Times and the Guardian.

“I was reading the newspaper articles about it, and when I got home, I showed it to my wife, I was proud of myself and all that, and she said to me: ‘You’re full of shit if you don’t continue your classes.’ So I continued my classes,” he says with a laugh.